AMAZING GRACE

Wake up. Witness. Anything can happen to anybody.

Nobody is immune, and it is a fantasy if we believe we are.

We once were blind (I promise there is joy at the end of this difficult bunch of stories.)

A young mother with a toddler, expecting a comfortable life with her working husband is suddenly left, stranded, and she walks the grocery aisles calculating pennies, humiliated, afraid. She has no family to ask for help—she’d believed she had changed her lot by finding and marrying her best friend, her soul mate. Where to go? How to feed her baby? Can she stay in her apartment, get a job and be a good single mother?

“We never thought it would happen to us,” says a shell-shocked couple whose child was massacred in a school shooting.

Earthquakes, tornadoes, weather “acts of God” with a government deregulating polluters and calling climate change a “hoax.”

“In a split second, our lives changed,” says the man whose entire family was killed in a car accident. If he’s white with a good job, maybe he’ll be traumatized but go on. If he’s not white . . . if his family’s life changed in a traffic stop because of a trigger-happy or frightened white cop?

The family who has worked and saved and finally bought their dream home finds that they can no longer vote because politicians changed the rules.

A gifted student can’t go to college because . . . (pick: finances, obligations, no access because of where she lives). Or a gifted student goes to college and then has her achievements diminished by government-sponsored accusations of preferential treatment.

Hundreds of thousands of upper-echelon professional Black women lose their jobs with a stroke of the president’s pen . . . An accomplished upper-middle-class Black woman bleeds to death giving birth because hospital personnel do not believe she’s in trouble . . . Dreamers who have devoted their lives to fulfilling their parents’ educational dreams are deported to countries they’ve never lived in. Parents, American citizens with black and brown skin, are kidnapped off the street and disappeared . . . into American government-sponsored concentration camps that are in turn owned by huge companies listed on the stock exchange and, unbeknownst to small investors, hidden in their portfolios so that they are unwitting supporters of something they abhor.

A baby is born into a nice middle-class white family. Left in the care of her uncle or grandfather or trusted family friend, she is molested. This continues throughout her childhood. There are no records to substantiate this abuse, but it goes on all over the country, affecting 63,000 reported cases a year . . . and millions more unreported. A tiny fraction of this incalculable population of girls and also some boys is targeted because of their vulnerability by people far less famous than Jeffrey Epstein. So imagine the Epstein survivors as the mere tip of several continental-size icebergs of abuse and pain.

For a few seconds a fraction of the stories makes the nightly news. “Oh, it’s awful,” we moan. And then we go about our business.

The problem is that these stories happen in the dark everywhere. They are not the purview of one race or class, although historically we lump them on “the lower classes” and refuse to see that they’re everywhere.

But now we see

It’s undeniable as they spread like cancer throughout our society.

They have always been here, but now our lack of freedom is visible. The one-percenters, always ahead of the curve, are buying islands or building well-stocked bunkers with independent energy systems because they see what we want to ignore and they believe they can escape it.

Nobody can escape as long as these conditions are ignored and allowed to escalate, and they are escalating.

And now for a truth that sounds bonkers

We simply cannot be free until all of us are free. That is fact and relentless mass witnessing and joyful action are needed.

Let me explain.

Have you ever laughed with somebody you’ve shared hell with? Or whose hell you resonate with because you’ve lived it? There is no greater shared belly laugh in the world.

If you do not see what is going on, if you function with tunnel vision or rebel against unhappiness with a false or selfish happiness, you cannot react in a way that is helpful. But once you see, you can choose a bigger joy than you ever imagined.

There is nothing like a huge protest of joyful people. I’ve attended many of them here in NYC. People sing, dance, and most of all, delight in each other’s honest company—sharing our passion for a just world with one another. Any notion of being alone in the fight vanishes in the group joy that happens when people join to make things better and freer for everyone.

And numbers matter—photographs of them all over the country. There is no way to ignore this kind of power and joy and truth.

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Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.